Eurocom D90xC Phantom-X

I am calling the Eurocom Phantom-X "The Notebook Performance King" in this review for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is my second review of a unit housed in the very successful D90xC chassis - the prior review being that of the first quad core model to become available in this chassis. The D90xC platform proves to be phenomenal and I'm sure looking forward to further revisions of this line.

The test unit specifications are as follows:

• Windows Server 2003 Enterprise (self-installed)
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 (3.0GHz, 12MB L2, 1333MHz FSB)
• 17-inch WUXGA display (1920 x 1200)
• Dual nVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX in SLI mode (1024MB each)
• Triple 128GB Memoright-GT SSD's in RAID 0 performance mode
• 8GB DDR2-800MHz RAM
• Intel Wireless 4965AGN
• 2X Blu-Ray Burner
• 12-cell integrated "UPS"

Reasons for Buying

The D90xC chassis is also available from other vendors, but I chose Eurocom, a boutique brand, for their willingness to support me in my custom configurations. In fact, at my time of ordering, Eurocom wasn't offering the Memoright drives as a built-in option (now they are available at www.eurocom.com). I contacted their exceptionally helpful support and they informed me that they would be happy to accommodate my custom requirements. This was very helpful of them and wouldn't be the last time I got great service either. Their excellent support continues after the sale ... as we will find out later in the review.

The reason I chose this particular notebook model is simpler to explain: it's simply the best configuration available today in a 17" form factor (or, for that matter, any notebook form factor). You cannot find a better configured system (even among the gargantuan 20" models). In fact, at the time of this writing you cannot even find equally configured models from other leading vendors such as Dell, Alienware, or HP. When investing this amount of money in a system, I want to get the best and only the best, so the choice was clear.

Build and Design

In fairness to the chassis, this isn't a system optimized for your "viewing pleasure," but performance. Expect to find the eye candy on the screen and not the external appearance of the notebook. Fitting three hard drives, two video cards, and a quad core desktop processor on top of that inside a 17" form factor is not easy.

With that in mind, the unit does look reasonably glossy and polished. Did I mention it's half as thick as a can of soda and the power brick alone is bulkier and heavier than many ultraportables notebooks?

Display and Camera

This is where the eye-candy part comes in. As befitting a notebook with this kind of graphical horsepower, the display is amazing. There is no light leakage and the colors are wonderfully reproduced on the glossy LCD. The contrast is fantastic and the ultra-brightness helps render lucid images. You can look at the display from any angle you like and it still looks perfect. This makes me feel like I'm getting my money's worth and that the notebook is delivering its weight's worth!

The camera is also very impressive. I was surprised how bright it was able to capture images and video, especially compared to my external USB cameras which are always too dark.

Speakers

Again, making full use of the available room in the case, we find four speakers, each very powerful. This is absolutely the best sound I have ever heard coming out of a notebook, the sound easily fills up a large living room and has surprised my guests on more than one occasion. Again, the notebook justifies its weight and form factor, delivering accurate sound reproduction and even surround sound for superb gaming or listening enjoyment.

I also appreciate the four jacks in the front of the notebook - both in the richness of their number, and also in the flexibility of being able to dynamically adjust the input/output signals going to/from each jack. You can plug anything anywhere you like and the sound card application lets you dynamically configure your sound source or output, not based on what physical jack you used, but entirely in the software. This makes your four physical jacks do a lot more than would have been possible with four "physically hard-coded" jacks.

Processor Performance

Ready for more good news? Well here we start off with the benchmarks. We have record-breaking scores across the board and the 3.0GHz quad core CPU is no exception. 37 seconds in Super PI, a single threaded application, ensures that the 3.0GHz clockspeed is being put to good use. 15 seconds in wPrime, a multi-threaded CPU benchmark, is the fastest I have ever seen on a notebook, not in the least due to wPrime's ability to utilize all four processor cores.

Cinebench rendering scores are also the fastest I have ever seen in a portable system. 3,289 is the single core score and 11,669 is the quad core score, with 3.55x being the quad core acceleration factor as reported by Cinebench itself.

Leaving synthetic benchmarks aside, I can personally attest to the wonders of the quad core effect. You would be foolish to think that you'll never need more than two cores. In fact, with most applications and games already targeted for dual cores, you're not well equipped without a quad core system. A rogue application that would normally freeze your computer barely registers on this system, with three cores available for further processing. You could compress/encrypt/or perform an otherwise lengthy arithmetic operations on one core, surf the web with another core, leave a core for a misbehaving or poorly coded application to abuse, and still have room for more. This should be the definition smooth computing and dramatically improves the user experience.

Storage Subsystem and Overall System Performance

Considering that this unit has three SLC SSD hard drives, each of which alone costs more than most gaming notebooks, our expectations are set high. Are these high expectations met?

Yes, they are. As evidenced in the attached HDTune and HDTach screenshots, this machine screams. The three SLC SSD hard drives are put to great use with the RAID 0 array. The characteristic "flat-line" performance of solid state technology is evident in the charts, offering consistent performance across the entire "surface area" of the drives, whereas with rotating disks, performance tapers off near the drive's end. The seek times are also negligible - .01 ms - which is in fact where the majority of noticeable performance enhancements come from in SSD technology. Yes, read/write speeds are also better, but not by three orders of magnitude as in the seek times - which is what you're really noticing when applications instantly launch on SSD's. Memoright drives are very expensive but they deliver the best performance, period. Their cost is due to their SLC architecture which makes these drives the only SSD drives able to outclass 7200rpm disks in random writes. No stuttering or other problems that you may have experienced with cheaper MLC solid state drives here. You're getting your money's worth, dollar for dollar, with these disks. Random writes, random reads; sequential writes, sequential reads; it's all spectacular.

One might expect the synthetic benchmarks to perform even better, and rightly so. The Memoright drives are somewhat handicapped by their SATA-I interface (which apparently is not even really a genuine SATA interface, but really a PATA-bridge to these drives that are internally configured with PATA technology). Fortunately the RAID 0 array overcomes interface bottlenecks in this regard, splitting the data across three drives. While the synthetic results could have been much better (as they are with other, cheaper MLC SSD drives), don't let them concern you.

Some real world experience: I've booted four virtual machines running on VMware on this rig without any hiccup. All machines start simultaneously and extremely rapidly. You can then start installing gigabytes of data onto these VMs, again all simultaneously. On traditional hard drives, the drive heads would be begging for your mercy. On MLC solid state disks, the entire operating system would be brought to its knees due to the intensity of random writes. On this system, you just sit back and enjoy the show! You get your work done in record time and actually enjoy the process, with your hardware no longer holding you down.

The amazing PCMark05 score of 11,823 also serves as further testament to the power of this machine, with its CPU and storage subsystems combined. You can really tax the CPU and the hard disks as much as you want; they deliver without an iota of complaint.

Windows Vista seems to think this machine is really the performance king! The Vista performance index of 5.9 across the board whets our appetite to see beyond the 5.9 barrier. Fortunately, Windows 7 has just entered beta and I was able to obtain a Windows 7 performance index too. Surprisingly, RAM performance fell to 5.5 on Windows 7, possibly due to driver issues - after all, Windows 7 did just enter beta. Desktop graphics were awarded the peak score of 7.9 while 3D graphics were rated at 6.0, with the remaining two scores in the 7.x range. This machine is definitely future proof.

Gaming Performance

The synthetic benchmark scores of 15,569 3DMark06's in SLI and 11,742 3DMark06's without SLI provide some indication of the gaming power available in this system, but to truly appreciate it, you have to test it in the real world with games. I used FRAPS for real world gaming benchmarking and also the built-in benchmarking tools of the games themselves where available.

I tested all games at the phenomenal 30" resolution of 2560 x 1600, and suffice to say that except two of the most demanding games today, framerates we spectacular. Those two games, you probably guessed them right, were Crysis and Grand Theft Auto IV. For these, I have also enclosed benchmark results at 1920 x 1200 resolutions, just to prove that at "reasonable" resolutions, absolutely no game today can withstand this machine's prowess. All games, including Crysis and Grand Theft Auto IV, were benchmarked at maxed out details - everything single slider pushed to the maximum limit ... plus some black-hat tricks to allow the games to go higher than their developers had intended.

For Grand Theft Auto IV, I had to use the feature unlocked commandline.txt file tweak to have it allow me max everything out. Paraphrasing the publishers of the game, they intentionally limited the maximum details that can be enabled in the game settings panels, because "current hardware does not allow the game to run at full settings, and the game will provide for many years of enjoyment as graphics hardware improves and more features of our product can be unlocked in the future." Well, Rockstar, looks like that future has already arrived in the body of the Phantom-X. The 9800GTX cards with their 1GB memory come in real handy for this game; the 8800GTX card series have only 512MB memory which becomes a serious limitation for this video-ram intensive application. For instance, I was able to test the Dell XPS 1730 equipped with dual 8800GTX's with Grand Theft Auto IV, and results were even less than half-as-good compared to what I was able to obtain with this system. Stay away from the 8800GTX if you can, I certainly am glad I did! As the results demonstrate, I was able to play Grand Theft Auto IV at 2560 x 1600 with acceptable framerates, and when resolution dropped to 1920 x 1200, performance left no room for complaints.

Crysis was hacked using the feature unlocking graphics profile files, which enable DirectX 10 features on the DirectX 9 version of the game. Crytek are well aware of these hacks and have completely removed this artificial limitation in Crysis Warhead and Crysis Wars, fortunately. With all graphics details thus unlocked, Crysis was again very playable at 2560 x 1600, with superb framerates at 1920 x 1200 resolution.

For every other game 2560 x 1600 resolution was simply perfect; with extremely high framerates. The Phantom-X is a dream machine and moreover a testament to not only the power of notebook gaming, but PC gaming as well. Being able to play GTA4 on my PC with the same level of detail as a Playstation 3 is certainly satisfying and reassuring for the future of PC gaming.

Heat and Noise

The notebook doesn't get hot, which is remarkable given that it houses two video cards, four processor cores, and three hard disks. It doesn't run very quiet, but noise levels are never bothersome.

One very nice tweak is pressing the Fn+1 button combination. This turns on the "turbo-fans" until the key combination is pressed again (do not mistake the key combination with F1). While the "turbo-fans" are actually loud and would get to be a bother, they ensure that your computer will never overheat and leave you stranded without a save game in that level you've been playing for hours to crack. It's nice to have this option even if you would never have to use it.

Customer Support

Customer support from Eurocom has been absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately, my Memoright RAID array experienced a failure, due to a problem with one of the disks. Eurocom arranged a direct shipment of new disks for me from Memoright, even before they confirmed receipt of my return disks. To be frank, I expect nothing less in customer service after having invested so much on the drives and the machine overall. But it was still very pleasing to see that "they cared" and got me replacements before they had even received my return of defective parts. This post-sale support has been truly phenomenal and is very reassuring, especially given the cost of the replacement drives. I will certainly continue to do business with Eurocom as they really know how to support their customers - as this post-sale catastrophic failure demonstrated.

Do-It-Yourself Upgrades

One of the main strengths of the D90xC chassis is how easy it makes user upgrades. No need to send this one back to the factory for a retrofit. In fact, when I first received this system, it was equipped with dual 8800GTX video cards, a 2.83GHz Intel Q9550 processor, and 8 MB of 667MHz RAM. And as aforementioned, I also had to swap out the hard drives when they failed with brand new ones.

Replacing the processsor was really fun. These desktop models do not have any pins on them, so you can handle the chips really comfortably. After removing the bottom panel of the notebook, the CPU heatsink is easily detached, which reveals the CPU assembly. The insertion socket is very easy to operate and requires absolutely no force. It was really very simple to swap out the old processor and put in the new one.

The RAM is located right by the processor and was probably the easiest of all to replace, much like any other notebook RAM. Interesting here was the addition of a fan directly on top of the RAM cards, ensuring these high speed parts stay cool.

The dual graphics cards are accessible in the same area - the underbelly of the laptop. Again, you first detach the heat sinks and then remove the cards. The SLI bridge cable looks very small and cute, especially in comparison to its desktop version. The cards slide in and out very easily, actually much like RAM sticks. Proving the concept of modular, upgradeable notebook cards on notebooks, these dual MXM4 slots are a protection of your investment in this notebook. I only wish that we'll see more of these slots on more machines and smaller form factors.

More good news on the upgrade front is that the D90xC chassis seems to have a lot more life in it. Apparently this platform has already been successfully migrated to the new i7 Intel microarchitecture based on the X58 chipset, and will offer support for nVIDIA's GXX architecture (G280 anyone?) with DDR5 video memory and DDR3-1333 main memory. The fantastic folks at Eurocom assure me that when these upgrade parts are officially available, they will provide an upgrade path for current D90xC chassis owners, keeping this model current for as far away in the future as we can see right now. Like I said, Eurocom have some fanatical support!

Conclusion

I don't remember the last time I was so satisfied with a purchase. I am really happy that while major brands fall behind on specs and support (but not prices), I have been able to find a boutique alternative in Eurocom, for comparable prices but superior performance and support. I will definitely not hesitate before my next Eurocom purchase knowing well that my investment is well-protected by their fanatical support - not only in the case of hardware failure, but also by future-proofing me with seamless, self-serviceable upgrades in the D90xC chassis.

Pros:

• Simply the best notebook money can buy today
• Gaming performance on par with a Playstation 3
• Superb for demanding business applications
• Future-proof components with user-serviceable design

Cons:

• Inevitably, cost ... but you get what you pay for
• Weight ... near luggable scale